Cry For Happy

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You wouldn’t know it from watching this, but Miyoshi Umeki won an Oscar and got a Tony nomination just a few short years prior to this cringe-inducing “comedy.” But five years is a long break, and between Sayonara in 1957 and Cry For Happy in 1961, Umeki was nowhere to be found on the big screen despite possessing Hollywood’s preeminent film award. What she gets sacked with is another smiling, placid figure in a nothing role that we know will eventually wind up with one of the four American GIs crashing in the geisha house. This doesn’t stop the GIs from basically inferring that the geishas are prostitutes and trying treating them as such. A series of misunderstanding and outright lies escalate to a zany conclusion, there's a happily-ever-after, and the geisha becomes an orphanage because why bother successfully developing one plot strand when you can half-ass a series of them? No one looks like they’re having much fun here, with Glenn Ford looking bored and Donald O’Connor adrift without pulling faces or breaking out into a song-and-dance number.